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Ambassador Harriman Has Stroke, Reported Near Death

FRANCE — Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, suffered a massive stroke and is near death at a hospital in Paris, CNN reported Monday, quoting a senior administration official.

The network said Harriman, 76, reportedly collapsed at home while exercising earlier Monday and was rushed to a hospital, where she remained unconscious. The administration official said Harriman was "very close to death."

Harriman, whose full name is Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, was national co-chairman of the 1992 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign. After President Clinton was elected in 1992, one of his first stops in Washington was a dinner party at Harriman's Georgetown home.

For her favors to the Democratic Party over the years, Clinton named her ambassador to France in 1993, one of the most prestigious plumbs of diplomatic appointments. The English-born Harriman became a naturalized U.S. citizen after marrying her third husband, the late financier and diplomat W. Averell Harriman in 1971.